Great Teachers

   “A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”
― Albert Einstein

 “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” -- Ken Robinson

Some of the questions I’ve pondered for much of my adult life are “What makes a teacher great?”  and “How do we educate ourselves and our children?”  I love movies like the Ron Clark Story, Freedom Writers,  Stand and Deliver, and The Ben Carson Story .  I think there are important lessons and insights in these movies that apply not only to disadvantaged youth, but to all children. 

I recently heard a Colorado legislator arguing for a reduction in money for K-12 citing studies showing that throwing more money at education does not yield commensurate benefits. He continued his argument by stating that college level courses often had very large classrooms (lecture halls?) yet were successful in educating their students. What is required to properly educate our students, particularly the young?

I think many scientists would say that they had a great teacher that inspired them, that started them on their journey of exploration, a teacher that they admired. I think these teachers have a number of characteristics that define great teachers:

 A great teacher is, first, a great student.  A great teacher learns as much from his students—maybe more-- than they give back.  In all the movies above, the teachers carefully observed their students-- learned about the personal lives and motivations, the impediments to learning, and the life passions of their students—and adapted their teaching methods to connect to their students.  This theme of connection resonates through my blogs, and it is seminal to education.  A great teacher can connect to the mass audience in a large lecture hall, with universal themes in stories and parables that touch our emotions as well as our intellect.   

What is missed in these large lecture halls is the intimate connection that comes from the interaction of student and teacher, and this can be incredibly powerful.  An example comes to mind of a great teacher I had in college (University of Colorado, Boulder) in a class on the biology of the bi-lipid membrane.  The professor was L. Andrew Staehelin, now a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado.  Towards the end of the course, we were required to write a research paper on a topic we chose.  Dr. Staehelin did something that was unique in my university experience.  He sat down with each and every student and went through their manuscripts line by line.

Obviously, this cannot be done in a large lecture hall classroom.   His intent was not only to teach by pointing to shortcomings in the manuscript, he also solicited additional information from the student by asking questions.  He got to a section in my paper that cited an experiment, where he admitted he didn’t understand what I was trying to communicate.  I had to confess to him that I really did not understand the paper I cited.   What Dr. Staehelin told me (see Einstein above) was that if I didn’t understand the paper, the authors of the paper did not understand the experiment well enough to communicate to me effectively. 

Now, imagine my surprise from having a highly regarded scientist at the top of his field telling me—an undergraduate—to trust my own instincts, to trust myself:  That the fault did not lay in me; that I had not failed; that my inability to understand was not due to my stupidity.  That what we had here was a failure to communicate.  How empowering!  I have never forgotten that lesson, and it is a lesson that I pass on to my children, co-workers and employees.  This is the kind of student/teacher interaction that can and should take place in every classroom every day.  Yet this is kind of interaction is not possible or occurs infrequently in large classrooms.

Another trait that I have observed in good teachers is a passion—not only for teaching—but for their subject matter.  I visited my daughter’s classroom in 5^th grade, where I was able to observe a science lesson.  The lesson consisted of writing vocabulary words on the blackboard and querying the students for concepts in the lesson.  What I did not see was the passion, the mystery and wonder of events, the flights of imagination... the creativity! I love to play what I call the “caveman” game with my kids.  How did that first person come up with a way to measure time?  Distance?  What tools in nature could that person employ to solve a problem? 

I watched a TED talk video ( www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html) by Sir Ken Robinson, a creativity expert.  He is an incredible communicator, and very funny, but he has a serious message:  There are different forms of intelligence, yet we try to put all students in the same box in school.  We de-emphasize the creative arts and don’t encourage our students to develop their creativity.  Liz Coleman (www.ted.com/talks/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html) talks about rethinking our educational strategy.  We drive our students to become experts in a narrow field.  Our students learn more and more about less and less.  And because of this, we begin to lose our ability to communicate—to connect with each other.  Ironically, the scientists that I most admire--and the ones that I hire--are the creative individuals who are interested in the whole world around them.  I find that I can talk with them about everything—from the origin of the universe, to politics, to quantum physics, to diet and exercise, to global warming, to evolution, to anything and everything--in the world around us.

Finally, a good teacher gives her students permission to fail.  I struggled with this concept at first.  My business education taught me that good management does not reward effort, but rather success.  And that’s what we do in school now.  If you get an A, I will give you an extra recess or a slice of pizza.  It does take effort to get an A—but if you fail you don’t get rewarded.  Of course the unintended consequence of this strategy is that we develop children (or employees) who don’t take risks because there is no reward for failure. 

I think a better strategy is to encourage an internal, rather than external, reward.  Better to reward our children for exercising their imaginations.  To find motivation from the joy of discovery.  To revel in our curiosity about the world around us.  And if we fail, to realize that there is no failure if we learn.  There is no better teacher than failure, if that failure is a result of daring greatly--of attempting to do something that lies in the very limits of our ability.  I once heard that chess great Bobby Fisher remarked that he never learned anything from winning a chess match.  Yet the hallmark of Bobby Fisher's chess was the imagination, boldness and fearlessness of his game in spite of the risks.

I marvel that my children have an incredible ability to find out answers to their questions on the internet.  My greatest challenge is not to have them find the answers, but to ask the questions.  I pray that they get teachers who can inspire them to ask questions.